In 2013, that didn’t stop pundits and politicians from making bold calls based on little other than guesswork and a willingness to be wrong. As Daniel Kahnemann, the Nobel laureate, explained the game, “You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.” But Google never forgets, and neither do we at Politico Magazine. In the words of one economic forecaster: “He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass.” Herewith, the year’s biggest prophecies gone awry.

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The Obamacare Rollout Will be Great

Slate writer Matt Yglesias: “I wanted to once again take the opportunity to lay down a marker and say once again that Obamacare implementation is going to be a huge political success.” And here: “…conservatives are certainly fooling themselves if they’re expecting a backlash driven by problems around implementation. … Snafus will be real enough, but broadly speaking, the rollout is going to be a huge success.” Slate.com, July 17

MSNBC host Ed Schultz: “If you go to this Web site, you will find out how easy it is to read, how easy it is to navigate all the information, all the basic questions, and all the direction you need to take to get involved, to get health care.” MSNBC, Sept. 30

President Barack Obama: “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. (Applause.) If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period.” Chicago address, June 15, 2009

The roster of mistaken predictions about the Oct. 1 launch of HealthCare.gov, the federal website where Americans can shop for health care plans, would fill an error log that would make Kathleen Sebelius blush. Suffice it to say that the implementation of Obama’s signature health law was a universally acknowledged fiasco that has taken the president’s approval numbers to new lows. His credibility also took a major hit as insurance companies notified hundreds of thousands of Americans that their plans would be canceled to meet the health law’s requirements, forcing Obama to apologize on Thursday, Nov. 14: “There is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate. It was not because of my intention not to deliver on that commitment and that promise.”

Syria’s Assad Will Fall

Republican strategist Karl Rove: “Syria's Bashar Assad will be forced from power, but Mr. Obama's failure to provide active, sustained U.S. leadership will result in a new Islamist regime in Damascus friendly with Iran.” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 2, 2012

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Rove is hardly the only pundit to get this call wrong—many inside the Obama administration thought the Assad regime would collapse, prompting the president to declare in August 2011: “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” But Rove’s geopolitical analysis here is questionable, too—Syria’s Islamist rebels despise Tehran, which is backing the Syrian regime to the hilt. Either way, Assad doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. (Rove also missed the mark on unemployment, which he said would remain “around 8%.” It’s now down to 7 percent.)

Washington’s Partisan Gridlock Is Coming to an End

President Barack Obama: “I believe that if we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.” Minneapolis speech, June 1, 2012

Months before his re-election, in June 2012, a self-assured President Obama predicted that Republicans would prove more congenial in his second term. In many ways, it was the signal mistake of his fifth year—a naïve expectation (his word) that informed the White House’s strategies on immigration, taxes and the budget. An anonymous aide then repeated the line to Mark Leibovich of the New York Times: “Our winning will teach them a lesson. It will make them look at themselves and realize that their positions are untenable. It will, finally, break the fever.” In October 2012, Obama even said he was “absolutely confident” he could reach a “grand bargain” with the GOP on the country’s biggest fiscal questions. Instead, Republicans and Democrats were throwing down over the “fiscal cliff” even before his second inauguration, heralding a rocky 2013 marked by unprecedented gridlock and partisan rancor.